Authors Electric

You know how everything happens at once sometimes? Of course you do. It's Christmas Eve, and if you've five minutes to read blogs, I'm impressed. And Life doesn't stop because it's Christmas. People get ill, babies arrive, kids fall off their bikes, grandmas complain about their knees in the cold. The weather can be kind, or angry, or simply perverse. Central heating breaks down. Many are working their socks off so that others can spend the time with their families. Some young people have exams when they go back to school. You get the idea. So it was a pretty silly time for me to launch a novel. But having spent forever researching and writing and editing and generally faffing about every word, it is now Finished! So why not wait until the New Year to launch it? Because I'm off to Malawi for six weeks in January, and who knows what will fill my hours when I get back. So it was publish now and be damned. Of course you don't have time to fill you...

Terry Pratchett used to work on six large computer monitors mounted in a bank in front of him.  Each one had a different screen - Google, 24 hr news, a couple of books in various stages and anything that interested him and was relevant to his work. He loved that inter-action, being connected to a wider world than his small study. Who needs the internet with a view like this from the window? Other writers find they can only work on a computer not connected to the internet.  Best-selling author Margaret Forster was even more extreme, but not unusual, in not working on a computer at all. Pen and paper are still very much in fashion and there are a number of studies that seem to show that writing by hand is not only beneficial, but can be more creative than tapping a keyboard. I don’t think I’m alone in sometimes finding the relentless white noise of social media a burden.  Publishers expect you to blog and tweet and answer emails pretty sharpish. If you self-publish ...

Ever wondered where our fascination with, and addiction to, stories comes from? They are as much a part of us as our DNA. Children tell them quite naturally, but our need for them is mysterious.  ‘At any given moment,’ Christopher Booker writes, ‘all over the world, hundreds of millions of people will . . . have their attention focused on one of those strange sequences of mental images which we call a story.’   It is, he states, ‘one of the most important mysteries’.* We are surrounded by stories – everyone  has their own story and we are all part of other people’s stories, as well as being part of the bigger historical story of the human race – the whole world is a web of interlocking narrative. We are all part of each other's stories Which is exactly how our ancestors saw it.  Not just human history and interaction, but the landscape as well.  Those weren’t hills on the horizon, they were the bones of some ancient god fallen in battle or the breasts o...

Katherine Mansfield by Kathleen Jones I'm writing this in New Zealand, which is a big country with a small population and it's a long way from anywhere by ship or plane.  That makes books expensive - particularly imported books.  There are quite a few small publishers here, and there are off-shoots of big publishers - like Penguin and Random House, but the print-runs are short and the costs high.   When Penguin NZ published my Katherine Mansfield biography , I was horrified to find out how much it cost to buy (about £50).  The consequence of the economic downturn is that publishers have been struggling here (Penguin have been taken over by Random House) just as they have elsewhere - and book shops have fared badly too.  There are wonderful small independent bookshops, but the big chains, like Whitcoulls, have been in deep financial trouble.  New Zealand is the kind of place that is perfect for the e-reader - no distribution costs and access to the fr...